Gao Emotion & Cognition Lab

The Cognition and Emotion Lab, based in the School of Psychology at Nanjing Normal University, investigates the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion perception and experience. We study how emotions are generated and represented in the brain, and how they interact with other cognitive functions such as attention and memory to shape human behavior. To address these questions, we employ a range of methods, including fMRI, EEG, physiological recording, eye tracking, and computational modeling. 

Lab News

• 2026/05: Chuanji joined the Editorial Boards of Communications Psychology and BMC Psychology. 

• 2026/04: Chuanji joined the Editorial Board of Advances in Psychological Science (心理科学进展).

• 2026/04: Chuanji joined the Editorial Board of Behavioral Sciences.

• 2026/03: Chuanji Gao received the APS Rising Star designation from Association for Psychological Science.

• 2026/01: New preprint showing that the brain represents words through eight distinct latent dimensions, mapping these multifaceted properties onto functionally differentiated cortical systems during naturalistic narrative comprehension.

• 2025/11: New preprint showing that RSA may be less effective than linear regression for model selection and fitting when direct stimulus-response mappings are available.

• 2025/07: New paper in The Journal of Neuroscience investigating the neural representations of how positive emotions enhance memory during repeated learning. Featured in Nature Research Highlight, in collaboration with Xi Jia and colleagues.

• 2025/07: Congratulations to Run Han on winning Third prize in the 'Houcan Cup' national undergraduate psychological assessment challenge. 

• 2025/07: Chuanji joined the program committee of the Jiangsu provincial society for neuroscience. 

• 2025/06: Our poster, presented at the 2025 OHBM Annual Meeting in collaboration with Rutvik Desai, Svetlana Shinkareva, and Gang Chen, compared representational similarity and regression analyses using both simulated and empirical datasets.

• 2025/05: New paper in Communications Biology, using neural networks and fMRI to show the importance of object representations in predicting emotion ratings of scenes.

• 2025/05: Congratulations to Menglin Jiang and Shengrun Wu on winning a Jiangsu psychological society undergraduate research fund!

• 2025/03: Congratulations to Ziyuan Guo on receiving an offer to pursue an MS in Information Studies at UT Austin! Ziyuan completed her undergraduate thesis in our lab.

• 2025/02: Congratulations to Shengrun Wu and Menglin Jiang on winning an undergraduate innovation training project!

• 2024/10: New paper in Cognition and Emotion, reporting on the impact of emotional contexts on temporal source memory, in collaboration with Xi Jia and colleagues.

• 2024/10: New paper in Human Brain Mapping, showing that the brain represents conceptual knowledge of emotion in both modality-specific and supra-modal regions.

• 2024/07: Chuanji presented a talk at the conference on emotion and health psychology on 'neural representations of emotion categories in the visual cortex'.

• 2024/06: New paper in Acta Psychologica investigating the effects of emotion on word memory by analyzing multiple large datasets.

• 2024/01: Chuanji received an NSF grant.

• 2024/01: Chuanji received a grant from Ministry of Education. 

• 2024/01: New paper on the effects of encoding type and retention interval on emotional memory published in Current Psychology.

• 2023/12: New paper in Cognition and Emotion showing that negative emotion amplifies retrieval practice effect. 

• 2023/10: New paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review investigating how auditory valence influences subsequent visual semantic processing.

• 2023/09: New paper in Behavior Research Methods introducing SCOPE, a comprehensive psycholinguistic database that allows users to either obtain variable values for a given list of words or nonwords, or generate words/nonwords based on variable values within a specified range. The data can be freely explored or downloaded via a web interface and search engine: https://go.sc.edu/scope/.